Monthly Archives: August 2012

August 15, 2012 · 9:43 am

The ROI On A Cup Of Soup

According to what I can find in their public reporting,

Panera Bread

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Panera Bread spent somewhere north of $33 million on marketing last year.  Their financial results are impressive and they get good ROI on that investment.  I’m willing to bet, however, that the best marketing return they’re going to get this year is on a cup of clam chowder and a box of cookies. You might have heard about this story, but if you haven’t, this AdWeek article sums it up nicely.  A dying grandmother wants some Panera Clam Chowder on a day when the local store doesn’t make it.  A grandson calls to ask them to help.  A smart, responsive, caring manager immediately says yes and when the kid shows up to get it, gives him a box of cookies for grandma to go along with the soup.

It being the age of social, the grandson shares the story on his Facebook page.  Half a million “likes” and 22,000 comments later, that cup of clam chowder bought Panera more goodwill and positive marketing than most of the cash it spent.  Let’s think about what went right and why.

  • Someone answered the phone.  Sounds like a small thing but how many companies do these days?
  • Someone made a decision.  Not “I’m not authorized to do that” or “I need to ask corporate”.  Someone decided to do the right thing and was empowered to make the decision stick.
  • Someone went beyond what they were asked – cookies too!
  • A brand behaved like a person!  The kid didn’t call Sue, the manager.  He called Panera which Sue represented.  The wholly human way in which she responded was perfect.
  • Panera didn’t tell the story – the kid did.  Panera didn’t manufacture anything (except the chowder and cookies).  This resonates because it’s real.

The best marketing these days tends to be just like this – treating your customers well and letting them tell the story for you.  Yelp, Trip Advisor, and other review sites are all about this, and their comments often get ported to other social sites (the usual suspects).  More time on service training and less on trying to create viral media might just get you to the same destination.

Did you see the story?  What do you think?

Enhanced by Zemanta

1 Comment

Filed under Helpful Hints, Reality checks

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

August 14, 2012 · 8:43 am

Do Less, Be More Productive

Every manager I know – heck, every business I know – is having to do more with less.

English: Productivity comparison for the membe...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fewer resources.  Fewer people.  Hopefully not fewer consultants!  That means that every person on staff needs to be more productive.  Productivity is one of those tricky numbers – it’s a ratio of output to input – that seems more attuned to an industrial age than to a time when the world is moving to an information-based economy.  Still, one thing I speak with clients about all the time are results – key performance indicators, things we can measure to gauge our progress.  Sometimes I even get paid based on those productivity measures so I’m very focused on improving them.

One thing I’ve found is that we sometimes confuse putting out more with making more value.  I think many of the technological innovations which we enjoy these days were originally designed to help improve our ability to be productive.  In fact in many ways I think they had the opposite effect.  We’ve become tools of our tools.  For example many years ago when I began in business I was very careful about how I wrote each and every document because someone would have to type that document and if we needed to make changes we had to retype the entire thing.  Once word processing became the norm it was very easy to make revisions. In theory we could put out the document more rapidly since changing a word didn’t mean retyping everything.  The reality is that we spent a lot more time focusing on formatting – how the document appeared – and making little changes – a word here and there – because we could.  We didn’t think through what we were saying before we started to write.  I’m not sure we became all that more productive.

Email is another tool that should make us productive but has the opposite effect in many cases.  It’s easy to add recipients to a chain and everyone seems to want to weigh in.  What could be a 5 minute hallway conversation turns into an 8 hour chain of notes.  We’re less productive.

I advocate doing less to be more productive.  Send less email (but have more face to face conversations).  Don’t respond to every note unless it’s directed to you.  Don’t multitask – finish one thing before starting another.  Trust your staff and delegate.  Spend more time on the 20% that produces real value and less time on the other 80%. Maybe even pretend that a lot of the “productivity tools” don’t exist. What are your productivity secrets?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

August 13, 2012 · 9:25 am

Stop Behaving Like A Brand

A research study I read last week got me thinking about how I work with my clients on their use of Facebook and other social media.

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

Wildfire, a company that makes software for social media interaction (Facebook contest pages, for example) conducted an analysis of 10,000 social media campaigns over the last 9 months and focused on the top 10% of performing efforts.  The point was to identify strategies that seemed to work well.  If you’re interested you can get the report (registration required) here.   As reported by The RealTime Report:

Wildfire finds that for each person who shares content from a campaign on Facebook, 14 new people will learn about that campaign in their news feed. In addition, for every 10 advocates (those who are capable of bringing new followers to a campaign) a brand gets to join its social campaign, they’ll get 13 other people to interact with the campaign in some way. Overall, brands that are highly effective in engaging with advocates and content-sharers via campaigns see three times the interaction (Likes, shares, comments) on their Facebook pages when compared to other brands.

Impressive although I wonder how the transition to Timeline and the inability to set a contest or other Wildfire-type tab as the default on a brand page has impacted the results.  Even so, only 17% of fans share brand activity.  Then again, why should they?  Too many brands are focused on building a bigger audience (generating “Likes”) and not on any sort of collaboration among the fan base.  The companies who use Facebook and other social media well aren’t using those platforms as glorified broadcast channels.  Ask yourself what brands you follow (if you follow any) engage you.  I don’t mean they keep you coming back looking for discounts but they almost seem to be people.  You’re interested in what’s going on with them.

One of the strategies suggested in the report is to provide clear calls to action.  I don’t disagree, but how many of your friends ONLY post messages asking you to sign a petition or do something else that they feel is important but might have little relevance to you?  Providing exclusive content is a great strategy but not if that content only has value to the brand.  What’s the user benefit?

Social media isn’t like other media.  As a company, it’s less about you than it is your consumer.  That can be a hard change of perspective but it’s one companies need to make.  Stop behaving like a brand and start behaving like a friend.  I know of companies that do this well – tell me which ones you think are on that list.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under digital media

Tagged as , , , , , , ,